While the New York Times tells us some Americans are actually taking the name "Hussein" in honor of Barack Obama's to-date, third-rail- unmentionable-on-pain-of-social-and-professional-and-political-ostracism middle name--

“My name is such a vanilla, white-girl American name,” said Ashley Holmes of Indianapolis, who changed her name online [to Ashley Hussein Holmes] “to show how little meaning ‘Hussein’ really has”...Take me now, O Abyss--

Bill Clinton, the London Telegraph reports, is not exactly, all the way ready to make the change--or even pledge his fealty to his party's putative standard-bearer. According to a quoted senior Democrat:
"He's saying he's not going to reach...

This week's column mentions a conversation I had with a conservative British MEP (Member of European Parliament) who took issue with my concern about the Islamization of Europe for two basic reasons:
(One) For roughly the first 12 or 13 centuries of Islam until 1979, as he explained it, everything was effectively hunky dory with Islam; then that wascally wadical Ayatollah Khomeini showed up, ruining everything. In other words, Islam, which includes Islamic law (my concern), is fine; it's just those wascally wadicals who are a problem. And (two): My MEP told me he knows a perfectly lovely man who is Muslim--prays five times a day and everything--so, well then. At one point in the conversation, he rather abuptly said that if my reading of Islam's intrinsic incompatibility with Western-style liberty was correct, Europe had only two choices: Conversion to Islam or deportation of Muslims. Rather than face up to the hard-eyed task of...

Charles Krauthammer on the stunning flips and flops of Barack Obama, and the even more stunning negligence on the part of the media in not reporting on them:

I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight -- switching sides in World War II, for example -- whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.

Readers concerned about incursions of Islamic law into Western society often ask me what they can do about. Well, besides filling your larders with Danish imports, here's something: Contact members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and urge them to pass the federal version of New York State's "Rachel's Law," which I have written about here. It is called THE FREE SPEECH PROTECTION ACT (S-2977 & H.R. 5814), and it has been introduced by Reps. Peter King (R-NY) and Anthony Weiner (D-NY) and Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA).

More info below, including lawmakers' email addresses.
Like NYS's "Rachel's Law" this federal bill would protect American journalists from libel suits brought...

As a dutiful American columnist, I should probably be pondering the half-baked presumption behind Barack Obama's bizarre "presidential" seal. Or shaking my head at John McCain's hair-trigger panic over an aide's answer to a question about terrorism's political impact. Or clucking over the irresponsibly childish $300 billion goodie bag -- I mean, mortgage bailout bill -- that just passed in the U.S. Senate. But I can't stop thinking about Europe.

No surprise there. I just returned from a swift-moving, fact-finding journey through six European countries. And that tally doesn't even include two side-trips: one to Luxemburg just to buy cheaper diesel fuel (no kidding); and one to the German town of Monschau in the northern Ardennes where my G.I. father, still wearing the summer-weight uniform that perfectly suited Normandy in June of 1944, contracted pneumonia in December of the same year, and was thus taken off the front line for medical treatment just days before the Germans launched...

The New York Times today tells a harrowing story about the Islamic system of dhimmitude forced onto Christians in Iraq under the very noses of American forces--but it's clear the newspaper doesn't realize it. The subject at hand is a Sunni-insurgent version of the "jizya," or Islamic poll tax, which, since the days of Mohammed, has been collected from Jews and Christians according to Islamic law as payment for thepermission to worship non-Islamically. According to a Christian member of the Iraqi parliament quoted in the story, "All Iraqi Christians paid."

From the Times report:

MOSUL, Iraq--As priests do everywhere, Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, the leader of the Chaldean Catholics in this ancient city, gathered alms at Sunday Mass. But for years the...

One of the many nice people I recently met in Europe was the Scandanavian blogger Snaphanen. Having just visited his site--mainly in Danish, alas for me, although I notice he was kind enough to put up yesterday's post--I have come away with this video clip (above) taken from BBC's Newsnight. It is an interview with Margot Wallstrom, conducted in the wake of the spunky Irish No Vote against ratification of the EU's Orwellian Lisbon Treaty earlier this month. Wallstrom is a high EU official who, like other high EU officials, simply doesn't care whether EU-member states ratify the Lisbon Treaty: They will push it through regardless of things like plebiscites, people's will, stuff like that.

The question she repeatedly and fascinatingly dodges in this clip is what voters in Europe can do to stop the Lisbon Treaty. Her point is: Nothing.

If, as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan said earlier this year to Germany's sizeable Turkish minority, "assimilation is a crime against humanity," what might a predicted football victory by Germany over Turkey tonight in Switzerland be?

The Islamic strategy to compel the suicidal West to destroy its own identifying liberties by exploiting capitalism's essential weakness-- blithering fear of shrinking markets--continues apace with renewed calls for an Islamic boycott of Dutch and Danish goods.

The ultimate goal, according to campaign spokesperson Zakaria Sheikh, is to enact a universal law that prohibits the defamation of any prophet or religion, similar to the international legislation banning anti-Semitism.

Aha: The "ultimate goal" is to outlaw debate and dissent about the totalitarian tenets of Islamic ideology. This is a goal being simultaneously pursued on all fronts.

Last summer, after writing a fantasy-column about what "President" Dick Cheney might have done during those few hours of presidential powers he held while George W. Bush was hospitalized for minor surgery, I received an email from Lt. Col. Allen West (USA ret.) (pictured above). He thanked me for including him the following "presidential" reverie:

Mr. Cheney checked his watch. It was already 35 minutes into his "presidential" term, but he had plenty of time left to issue presidential pardons for border agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean (now serving excessively harsh terms for wounding a fleeing drug smuggler following a struggle). And while he was at it, what about presidential recognition for the service of some of our great soldiers who have been overzealously prosecuted...

One thing I realized on my recent Euro travels is that President Bush set out to democratize the wrong part of the world. It is European-Union Europe (gripped by welfare state socialists, identity-denying appeasers and leftist totalitarian bureacrats), NOT the Islamic Middle East, that could have actually benefited from an infusion of good, ol' fashioned democratic principles--you know, freedom of speech, respect for election results (see EU attempts to reverse Ireland's recent No vote on the Lisbon Treaty), things like that.

That said, it is even more astonishing to read in this morning's Washington Post how there is now a force on the global political spectrum to the Left of lefty Europe. It is called Barack Obama for President. The Post, of course, didn't frame the story that way exactly, but the facts speak for themselves....

Having just returned to these United States from what can only be described as a whirlwind European tour that included stopovers ranging from several days to several hours in eight nations (!), I return to blogging (gently) by posting my most recent column, just in case anyone missed it. More, as they say, to come.

Enough pictures of La Bardot as Sex Kitten. Above is a picture of a mosque in Paris, aka The City of Light, where, coincidentally, a court just found Brigitte Bardot--an animal rights activist who has long campaigned against bloody Islamic ritual slaughter--guilty for the fifth time of "inciting racial hatred" for writing in a letter to then-Interior Ministry that France was “tired of being led by the nose by this population that is destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts.”

Aaron Klein breaks ground on the staffing connections between Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam and the all-but-official presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, connections first reported by Debbie Schlussel:

Sen. Barack Obama employed and continues to employ senior staffers who belong to the Nation of Islam, and the presidential candidate has some "worrying" ties to the controversial group headed by Louis Farrakhan, a former key Obama insider told WND.

The story goes on to tick off these NOI-Obama staffing connections, which began during Obama's days as an Illinois state senator (which, of course, only ended four years ago). A couple of the more recent links Klein reports are:

Jennifer Mason, who still works in Obama's Chicago Senate office as director of constituency services – "a key community liaison position," Klein writes--and Cynthia K. Miller, "whom the former insider identified as a Nation of Islam activist, served Obama in his early state Senate days and later as treasurer for his U.S. senatorial campaign."

Nope, Hillary's not going anywhere yet. So long as a winning delegate count eluded Obama, that made sense. But after he clinched the magic number, what did she do?

Dick Morris, in a column advising Obama not to offer the veep spot to Hillary, thereby turning his ticket into a Clintonian menage a trois, put it this way:

Last night, when Obama went over the top in delegates and could claim the nomination as his, Hillary organized a rally of all of her supporters, directly competing for airtime with the newly minted nominee.

So, he wins and she wants to take the marbles home. She may well determine that it is actually to her advantage to go gracious and all ship-of-stately on us, but for now at least, we see the True Clinton shining through. In a word (at least, I think it's a word): Waaa-aaaa-aaaa!

In the subterranean bowels of a provincial courthouse, a bizarre and frightening spectacle starts to unfold....

So begins Brian Hutchinson's account in the National Post (Canada) of the kangaroo court proceedings now underway under the auspices of something called the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. (Folks, we are now officially beyond the bounds of Orwell.) These proceedings are more than likely to culminate in a conviction against McLean's magazine for printing an excerpt of America Alone, the best-selling book by columnist Mark Steyn arguing that Western democracy is imperiled by the spread...

Reading about the Talibanization of Pakistan in today's paper, and the suicide-bombing of the already skeleton-staffed Danish embassy essentially live on the Internet, I want to know about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal: namely, is it possible to destroy it, remove it (military options) or just neutralize it (spy stuff)? And if not, why not?

And look at this snatch of background material from the Danish embassy story, which mentions, by the way, that there were new Motoon protests on Monday in the Pakistani city of Multan:

Denmark recently downgraded the embassy [in Pakistan] and moved out most foreign staff. In April, Denmark...

Catching up on the Elle magazine's Green Issue (my hairdresser was late) , I now realize that recycling is so much more than newspapers.

California jewerler Suzanne Felsten is introducing a line of oceanic-themed cocktail rings made out of recycled 18-karat-gold.

Of course! Why didn't we think of this before?

By mixing rose, yellow, and white gold scraps filed off during the typical design process and fashioning them into prickly sea urchins--natch--the Los Angeles native hopes to remind people how important it is to be mindful of natural resources and minerals.

But not, apparently, their greenbacks: The peach moonstone ring Elle features goes for $4,100 a pop. The mag is filled with similarly "important" "reminders," from organic cotton t-shirts to "vintage vegan leather" bags (?), to "cruelty-free mittens and hats [made] from baby alpacas that died of natural causes...

Worldnetdaily.com has the story here about "relandscaping" plans at a US military base in Kosovo that entail removing three crosses from outside the US army chapel there. Maybe Prozelytizing Marine should hand out his coins at the Pentagon.

This video clip (link below) has to be seen to believed by every citizen (over 18). In fact, even after seeing it and believing it, I don't know what to make of it besides the terrifying and inescapable fact that a man who may very well be the 44th president of the United States is not just out of his element, he is out of his mind. (Ditto, the giggling press corps, but we already knew that.)

Hat tip, my pal Pam of Atlas Shrugs, where you will also find her rather earthier assessment of the incident.

Today's Washington Post carries a story, first reported by McLatchey Newspapers, about a Marine based in Fallujah who has been "suspended" for handing out what the paper described as "only a few coins" inscribed in Arabic carrying two lines from the New Testament. One side of the silver-colored coin read: "Where will you spend eternity? (John 3:36)." The other side read: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16)."

This, of course, comes under the heading of proselytzing, which military regulations prohibit. (Question: Is this regulation specific to Islamic countries? Has it always existed? I don't know.) But to get to main point, let's just say, OK, fine. Knock it off, Marine.

"Security chief decries `'war on terror,' " reads the Financial Times headline. Which security chief is that? Only the senior intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security Charles Allen. The paper reports:

The [W]est needs a more comprehensive strategy to counter al-Qaeda propaganda and the US should stop using the term “war on terror”, according to a top intelligence official.

Charles Allen, the senior intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security, says the phrase is counter-productive because it creates “animus” in Islamic countries.

“[It] has nothing to do with political correctness,” Mr Allen said in an interview. “It is interpreted in the Muslim world as a war on Islam and we don’t need this.”

Hmmm. Think of all the other things that create "animus" in Islamic countries:...

From one of my favorite readers--sometimes known as "a retired cop friend of mine" (although it bears noting he also served as a police detective)--on his assessing an EU proposal to make terrorism, armed robbery, rape, and racism (including "Islamophobia") and xenophobia crimes throughout the EU, which, by the way, has been expanded to include North Africa and the Middle East.

He writes:

From Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary:
Main Entry:
xe·no·pho·bia
Pronunciation:
\ˌze-nə-ˈfō-bē-ə, ˌzē-\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
New Latin
Date:
1903
: fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign
From your BLOG:
"...A proposed European Arrest Warrant...

El Aroud, the New York Times reports in considerable detail, is "one of the most prominent Internet jihadists in Europe," exhorting Muslims to fight the jihad online from her home in Brussels. "It's not my role to set off bombs--that's ridiculous," she told the Times. "I have a weapon. It's to write. It's to speak out. That's my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb."

And so she continues, raving on about jihad. But what is most disturbing and train-wreck fascinating...

Just in from the noted European blogger Fjordman: Danmarks Radio-- Denmark's public radio station, which Fjordman calls the equivalent of the BBC "with the same Left-wing, multicultural political bias"--is sponsoring a beauty contest for headscarf-wearing women over age 15.

As the Copenhagen Post reports, "The radio station's youth club, 'Skum,' "--Skum?-- "is behind the project which they believe will display the 'cool Muslim women' who 'often make up a very fashion-conscious and style-confident part of the Danish street scene'. The competition is, however, also open to non-Muslim females."

Alas. Contentions, the blog of Commentary magazine, has a problem with this week's column. Abe Greenwald writes:

Over on her blog, Diana West gets a little hysterical about the fallout over the U.S. military sniper who shot up a Qur’an in Bagdhad.

Nice, ad hominem opener.

She objects to the reprimand the soldier received and the general air of apology from the U.S.

Which included, just to refresh, a deferential public apology from Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Hammond during which another US officer presented the assembled locals (likely insurgents, not long ago) with a brand new Koran after kissing it. Abe then quotes briefly from my column:

(AKI) - The US soldier who shot a copy of the Koran should be punished as an example to others, according to a key Shia cleric sheikh Abdel Mahdi al-Karbalai.
Al-Karbalai, who represents the religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, called for punishment in a sermon read to the faithful during Friday prayers at the central mosque of Karbala.
"As well as being expelled, that soldier should suffer an exemplary punishment in a way that is an example to others," the Shia leader said.
"What happened in Baghdad, where a solider from the occupied forces was discovered shooting a copy of the sacred Koran, was a grave insult to the feelings of Muslims."
The imam of Karbala, the holy Shia city, dismissed the excuses advanced by the US military to the Iraqi premier Nouri...

Raymond Ibrahim, editor of The Al Qaeda Reader, was kind enough to send me an article he wrote last fall documenting the similarities between "Mein Kampf" and the Koran--something I refer to in passing in today's column while examining the contrasting American reactions to the anti-semitism, supremacism, and totalitarianism of Mein Kampf in 1940 and the anti-infidelism, supremacism and totalitarianism of the Koran in 2008. Ray fills in the nitty-gritty (and fascinating) details here.

He concludes:

There should be little doubt at this point, of how similar the worldview delineated in The Al Qaeda Reader is to that...

Today's column came out of the editing chute a little late to make it into its regular Friday slots, such as The Washington Times. So, here it is, as promised:
Sniper shooting Koran hardly 'criminal behavior'
By Diana West
It is late August 1939. American columnist Augusta "Gusto" Nash, played by the incomparable Claudette Colbert in the 1940 movie "Arise, My Love," is sitting in a French railway car taking her from Paris (and love interest Ray Milland) to her next assignment: Adolph Hitler's Berlin. Not surprisingly, she is boning up for her new post in the Nazi capital by reading "Mein Kampf." Turning the pages, she looks increasingly disgusted, finally becoming incensed to the point where she slams the book shut and tosses it out the window.
The audience doesn't learn precisely what that final straw was, but given the book's notorious anti-Semitism, racism and militaristic plans for world domination, it's...

Me, I was always stopped cold by Sistani's "najis" list. You've heard of "My Favorite Things" ("Rainbows on roses and whiskers on kittens...")? Well, the najis list, as it appeared on Sistani's multilingual website, was what you might call His Un-favorite Things. They included urine, feces and other excretions, along with dogs, pigs, and "kafirs"--unbelievers in Islam. Call me crazy, but I always found it hard to cosy up to Sistani after that--and particularly after hearing about his ruling that...

Mr. Bush told a small group of Jewish, Palestinians and Israeli Arab students in Israel that they must be alert to the "poisonous" propaganda from state-owned radio and television stations in the Middle East that obstruct true peacemakers. He's right, of course. If we're serious about the pursuit of authentic peace, we must [also] be aware of the "sweet euphemisms" about radical Islam in American textbooks.

And not just serious about the pursuit of "authentic peace." If we're serious about preserving authentic freedom, we must do something about American textbook presentations of Islam, both "radical" and other. Here, via Family Security Matters, is "Islam in the Classroom," a five-part...

What does "Arise, My Love," a shimmering 1940 Mitchell Leisen-directed romance of the days before and after the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, have to do with events in Iraq this week after it was discovered that an American sniper had used a Koran for target practice?

With police now arresting cartoonists in The Netherlands, and bureacrats trying to shut the rest of us up with speech codes, Andrew G. Bostom's new book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, is here just in time. Not only is of sufficient heft to KO any would-be censor, it is also more than weighty enough--filled with facts, testimonies, letters, documents, analyses--to refute any Islamic apologist who wants to tell us how wonderful it is to be a Jew living under Islam. (And that includes, as one very perceptive review has already noticed, Bernard Lewis, whose academic imprimatur is on most of the failed Middle East policies of the last couple of decades, from Oslo to democratization.)

Gregorius Nekshot is the Dutch cartoonist arrested by Dutch police last week for cartoons he has posted on his website that lampoon Islam. Q: How do you say Totalitarian State in Dutch? In the video above (via Islam in Europe) , which is mainly in English, Nekschot explains the rationale behind his caricatures.

I've already columnized about President Bush's initial, vacuous and tear-your-hair-out revealing remarks on the 60th anniversary of Israeli statehood here.

What has subsequently generated a nice little political/media firestorm is this statement by the president in yesterday's speech before the Israeli Knesset:

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

One of the more socially destructive aspects of the (Bill) Clinton legacy has been the elevation of Brazening It Out--"It" being the kind of scandal that once upon a time shamed politicians into resignation over breaching what were once widely recognized as the boundaries of propriety through extra-marital affairs, gambling, and other reckless behaviors.

GOP Sen. John Vitter of DC Madam infamy comes to mind as one who, pre-Bill (and Monica), would have quietly disappeared, but there are many others. GOP Rep. Vito Fosella, whose drunk-driving arrest led to revelations of a longstanding affair and illegitimate child with a retired Air Force Colonel --a lady--is still on the fence over whether he will resign or run for re-electon.